First-ever AI Hackathon brings participants from across the country to Mysuru

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A first-of-its-kind national-level Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hackathon organised in the city saw an overwhelming response from the participants. The two-day event organised by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Engineering (NIE) in association with Open POWER Foundation and Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP-3) brought together students from different colleges and creative fields in the country to accelerate the training of AI model prototypes during a limited amount of time.

This hackathon helped to test the students' skill of fortitude and their ability to work under pressure. It demonstrated that the optimising time it takes to train a model and have a significant impact on time to results. This flagship event of NIE was organised for the first time ever in the country under the theme 'Accelerating AI at scale'. The event was presided by Dr G Ravi, principal at NIE, Dr Ashok Anand, Director, NIE-Management Committee, Dr H D Phaneendra, HOD of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Dr K Raghuveer, HOD of the Department of Information Science and Engineering, Sangeeth Keeriyadath, Advisory software engineer at IBM.

During the hackathon, the students' groups worked tirelessly overnight of which the juries selected seven groups who would be granted access to the Power AC922 server for implementing their pre-trained models. The selected teams presented their projects and ideas to the jury consisting of Sangeeth Keeriyadath, Sumit Shekar, Research Scientist at Adobe Research, Dr Akshar Kaul, Research Engineer at IBM research, Abhiram Sripathy, CEO of Mysore Consulting Group and Gautam Ramachandra, CTO of Mysore Consulting Group. The jury members declared Ram Prasad Naik, Sai Ayachit, Shampa Sinha and Vishruth M of team Skynet as the winners while the runner up of the hackathon were Ashutosh Priyadarshi, Satyam Shekhar, Shyam Kaushik and Devang J of team SDSA 5000.

Sharing his experience Ram Prasad Naik, Student Convenor of the AI Hackathon said, "It was a challenging task upon me to address the demanded levels. Nevertheless, I was able to assemble a diversely talented team of 36 volunteers, who lead on to make a significant mark in the history of NIE Mysuru, and the AI Community in our nation. We had the privilege of having with us, established personalities in the AI industry and research as keynote speakers and judges, who shared their expertise and mentored the participants."

He further said it was fortunate for him to have interacted with a lot of budding AI enthusiasts and their impactful ideas from across the country. Devang J, a member of the runner-up team said, "The Hackathon was a great experience for me and my team. We were newly delving into the world of machine learning and AI and the Hackathon let us explore new ways of training with being able to use PowerAI to accelerate our training and experiment with different prototypes quickly. The infrastructure of the Hackathon was very good and we thoroughly enjoyed interacting with the participants and the mentors."

The event had 23 teams from other states including Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and 16 teams from reputed colleges in Karnataka.